The Color of War

by James Campbell

  But now, curiously, the Navy’s public-affairs arm was doing everything in its power to promote the case to newspapers, distributing photographs of the men and describing it as the largest mass trial in the history of the Navy and the first of its kind during World War II. Although it was wartime, the Navy opened the trial to the public. Perhaps it was eager to showcase what it hoped would be the propriety and transparency of its judicial methods. Maybe, too, it wanted to prove that its resistance to integration had been justified. Black sailors, like the ones at Port Chicago, could not be trusted. Their carelessness had led to the worst home-front disaster of World War II. Following that tragedy, they had willfully committed an unthinkable act of mutiny during a time of war.

  Lieutenant Veltmann’s pretrial strategy was to assign to himself and each of his four attorneys ten of the defendants. Each attorney would conduct detailed interviews and, based on those interviews, prepare a defense. After questioning each man, Veltmann and his team seized upon a defensive strategy that they believed could derail the trial before it even began. In his “Objection of Accused to Charge and the Specification,” Veltmann cited the definition of mutiny from Winthrop’s Military Law and Precedents and asked to have the charges dismissed on the grounds that the men had not conspired together to “usurp, subvert or override superior military authority.” He conceded that although they might have disobeyed an order, their conduct did not amount to what Winthrop called “the gravest and most criminal of the offenses known to the military code.” Theirs was a case of “dereliction of duty” since their intention was not to seize command from their superior officers—the “essential element” of mutiny, as defined by Winthrop.

  Veltmann believed that the refusal to obey an order, even by a group of men, was not always the same as a conspiracy to overthrow and seize control. Winthrop called these incidents “disorders.” In his opinion they did not “constitute in general the legal offense of mutiny.” Winthrop added further that it was the intent that distinguished mutiny from other offenses with which it had often been confused.

  Meanwhile, Lieutenant Commander Coakley argued that historically the mere act of insubordination—“murmurings and mutterings”—absent any violence, had sometimes been considered enough to warrant mutiny charges. He pointed out that in 1923, with the publication of Naval Courts and Boards, the Navy, in fact, had attempted to broaden the definition of what constituted a mutinous offense.

  Understanding that the definition of mutiny was conditional and based on the shifting sands of circumstance, Coakley opposed Veltmann’s brief with a brief of his own, stating, “Evidence showing a joint, collective and persistent refusal by two or more men in the military or naval service to work after a lawful order to do so, or what might commonly be called a ‘strike’ by a group of military or naval personnel, constitutes sufficient proof of conspiracy to subvert or override military authority and consequently sufficient proof under the law of the charge of making a mutiny.” What Coakley was saying was that the required motive was implicit in the men’s disobedience.

  Admiral Osterhaus’s court agreed. Refusal to work might be termed a “strike” in the civilian world, but in the military those same actions were evidence of mutiny. Although the burden of proof rested with Coakley, the court had made it clear that the prosecution simply had to prove that the men had engaged in a conspiracy to strike, which implied a desire to mutiny. It was a generous ruling that clearly favored Coakley’s team.

  Although it was billed as the largest mutiny trial in U.S. history, when it opened at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, September 14, it took place in a small, unassuming Marine barracks building, which had been hurriedly converted into a courtroom, on Yerba Buena Island. Situated in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the 100-acre island with its steep and rocky shores and scent of eucalyptus commanded million-dollar views of Oakland and the tawny colored hills of the East Bay. To the west it looked out on the city of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. At Mare Island to the north, the bustle of war continued. Men were still loading Liberty ships, which would steam their way across the Pacific, where American forces awaited their precious cargoes. In the western Caroline Islands the 1st Marine Division would soon be locked in a bitter battle for the island of Peleliu, and off the northwest coast of New Guinea, General MacArthur’s forces (along with Australian troops) would soon invade the island of Morotai, which the general needed as a base for the liberation of the Philippines.

  In the stuffy barracks building, the defense and prosecution teams sat in straight-backed chairs at tables cluttered with papers and books. The fifty seamen sat shoulder-to-shoulder against a drab wall behind Lieutenant Veltmann and the defense team and to the right of the court. Each seaman wore his undress blues—standard-issue black shoes, straight-leg wool trousers, and a blue, V-neck jumper with a white T-shirt underneath. Despite the open window at the back of the barracks, they were hot and nervous and wanted to fidget, but Lieutenant Veltmann’s defense team had counseled them to project a positive image and to be as calm and courteous as they could. If the court was struck by anything, it was the size and age of the seamen. Barely five feet, six inches tall and not much over twenty years old, many of them still looked like boys.

  One by one the defendants came before the court to be arraigned. Without hesitation, all registered pleas of not guilty, including Joe Small, whose time in the hole had not weakened his resolve.

  Later that morning, Lieutenant Commander James Coakley called to the stand his first witness—Commander Joseph Tobin, head of the Ryder Street Naval Barracks. The Commander had been on hand almost from the beginning of the dispute. Shortly after being alerted to the problem by Lieutenant Commander Charles Bridges, Mare Island’s executive officer, Tobin left his office and hustled down to the parade ground. It was Tobin who, hoping to avert more trouble, had asked Chaplain Flowers to talk to the men.

  Coakley asked the commander to recite for the court the events of August 9. Veltmann objected often to the commander’s testimony. When Coakley finished, Veltmann moved to have Tobin’s testimony struck from the record because he could not identify by sight most of the men implicated in the alleged mutiny. Osterhaus overruled the objection.

  Under cross-examination after the lunch recess, Lieutenant Veltmann skillfully attempted to dismantle Coakley’s conspiracy case by getting Tobin to admit that he had only interviewed twenty-four of the so-called mutineers—none of whom he could identify in court—and that none had expressed a desire to seize command of anything. Although Tobin was the one who had recommended the court-martial, he acknowledged that he had given a formal work order to only six or seven of the seamen, and those men were quiet and respectful.

  Following Tobin’s testimony, Coakley called Lieutenant Delucchi to the stand. Since Delucchi’s Division No. 4 was at the heart of the demonstration, Coakley saw him as his ace in the hole, and the vindictive lieutenant was happy to comply. Delucchi wanted nothing more than to pin the crime of mutiny on the fifty men. He strode to the front of the court. When asked to identify the men from his division, the lieutenant pointed to twenty-five of the fifty sailors seated against the wall. Then he proceeded to tell how on August 9 he had heard some of the men from Division No. 8 make a threatening remark.

  “And what was that remark?” Coakley asked.

  “Don’t go to work for the white motherfuckers,” Delucchi replied. If the reporters in the audience wanted a bombshell article, here it was. Delucchi was implying that a potentially violent conspiracy to subvert the authority of the officers was hatched that morning. It began with Delucchi’s 4th Division, but quickly spread to the 8th Division.

  Veltmann was furious. As a former prosecutor, Coakley should have known that Delucchi’s remark was hearsay and inadmissible as evidence. At the time, Lieutenant Delucchi had been standing with his back to the 8th Division. Could he really identify the man, or men, who uttered the words? Veltmann also pointed out that every member of the 8th Division had gone back to
work.

  Coakley jumped in, arguing that just because Delucchi could not pick out the men, did not mean that the threat had not been made. The lieutenant was testifying under oath that he had heard the words “Don’t go to work for the white motherfuckers.” Admiral Osterhaus sided with the prosecution, overruling Veltmann’s objection, as he would time and again throughout the course of Delucchi’s testimony.

  On Friday, September 15, the court-martial’s second day, page one of the San Francisco Examiner captured the significance of the trial. The headline read, MUTINY TRIAL OF 50 MARE IS. SAILORS OPENS. The article continued, “With death the maximum penalty under the law, the Navy yesterday opened court-martial proceedings here against fifty Negroes charged with mutiny for refusing to handle ammunition in the loading of a naval vessel. It marked the first time in American naval history that so many defendants had been simultaneously tried during a single courtmartial, and records similarly failed to disclose a formal American Navy courtmartial in which mutiny was the charge.”

  At Yerba Buena Island, Lieutenant Commander Coakley and Lieutenant Veltmann debated whether or not declarations made by one member of an alleged conspiracy are admissible against all members of a conspiracy. If, for instance, one man said, “Don’t go to work for the white motherfuckers,” was he speaking for the group? Did that statement reflect the feelings of everyone, or just the man who uttered it? It was a battle that the defense did not want to lose.

  Reinvigorated by a night of rest, Veltmann again took up the issue of Lieutenant Delucchi’s September 14 testimony. “Sir,” he said, addressing Admiral Osterhaus, “a statement that applies to a particular accused cannot possibly apply to all the accused. I again ask that Lieutenant Delucchi’s comments be stricken from the record. Only the lieutenant’s comments regarding the men he had personally ordered to load ammunition are relevant.”

  Judge Advocate Coakley then asserted that the testimony was admissible as part of res gestae (a Latin phrase meaning “things done”), which established exceptions to the rule against hearsay evidence. Coakley argued that Lieutenant Delucchi could not have misunderstood the meaning of “Don’t go to work for the white motherfuckers,” or the speaker’s intentions. It was reasonable to assume that whoever uttered the words was speaking for the group.

  Coakley and Veltmann then argued back and forth about what the charge was. Was it the defense’s responsibility to defend the seamen against the charge of “making a mutiny” or “conspiring to make a mutiny”? Finally, Admiral Osterhaus got fed up with the legal jousting and ordered the court to be cleared.

  When the trial resumed, Osterhaus ruled against Veltmann’s objection to strike Lieutenant Delucchi’s remarks from the court record, although he did allow for the possibility that they might be removed upon conclusion of the prosecution’s case. It was a clear triumph for the prosecution that would profoundly affect the course of the trial.

  When Delucchi returned to the stand that morning, he testified that after Admiral Wright’s speech of August 11, he had walked over to his division just as the men were absorbing the full impact of the admiral’s words. That was when he heard someone seethe, “The motherfuckers won’t do anything to us; they are scared of us.” Then another man chimed in, “Let’s run over the motherfuckers.”

  The fifty defendants looked on stolidly, but Lieutenant Veltmann, fed up with Delucchi’s testimony, interrupted. Lieutenant Delucchi, he said, was again quoting anonymous speakers who were not part of the trial and, therefore, not part of the alleged conspiracy. The prosecution’s intention was obvious. By repeatedly mentioning the statements, he hoped to portray the seamen as crude and undisciplined in addition to being rebellious, and prejudice the court against them. Veltmann was again overruled.

  If Veltmann resented the admiral’s decision, he took his anger out on Lieutenant Delucchi during an hour of cross-examination, interrogating the lieutenant about every aspect of the alleged mutiny, pressing him for exact answers, and forcing the lieutenant to choose his words with extreme care.

  At 10:00 a.m. the following day, when the court reconvened, Lieutenant Commander Coakley called Lieutenant Commander Charles Bridges, Mare Island’s executive officer, to the witness stand. Bridges testified that he had ordered the men back to work. During his brief cross-examination of the witness, Lieutenant Veltmann established that, from where he was sitting, Bridges could not identify any of the fifty seamen as men whom either he or Commander Tobin had ordered back to work. At Admiral Osterhaus’s urging, Commander Bridges left the witness stand to get a better look at the men. He approached them reluctantly, making a pretense of studying the men, aware that even up close he would not be able to recognize any of them. A number of them were clearly older than the others, but beyond that, they all looked the same in their undress blues.

  When the commander returned to his seat, Veltmann asked him if he had given a “personal order for them to go to work.”

  “That is correct,” Bridges answered.

  Now Veltmann seized his opportunity. “Can you identify any of the men in this group of fifty that you ordered to go to work?”

  “No, I cannot,” responded the commander.

  Under cross-examination, Bridges also admitted that although he was just ten to fifteen feet from the divisions when Admiral Wright made his speech, he had not heard the men make the vulgar remarks or the threats that Delucchi had mentioned. The first two days had gone poorly for the defense, but here was a glimmer of hope. If no one else had heard the remarks that Delucchi claimed he had, it would be hard for Coakley to maintain that the men were working themselves into a state of mutiny.

  When the court met next on Monday morning, September 18, Chaplain Flowers took the stand. In contrast to Lieutenant Delucchi’s depiction of the seamen, Lieutenant Flowers, a South Carolinian who had been at Mare Island since the spring of 1943, described them as frightened but resolute, respectful, and “close-mouthed.” He also mentioned that a number of the men inquired about survivor’s leave. In addition, Flowers testified that on August 9, after he described the fear that frontline soldiers in their foxholes must fear, the seamen responded, “You can fight back in that case, but you can’t fight back … if it blows up.” Flowers might have been paraphrasing, but the men’s message was unmistakable: a man could defend himself against an enemy, but was powerless against an explosion like the one at Port Chicago. It was an issue of dignity for the seamen. They were willing to give their lives for their country, but they did not want to die as hapless victims.

  Under cross-examination, Flowers also admitted that the men did not say, “I refuse to handle ammunition,” but rather “I am afraid to handle ammunition.” Veltmann was not just splitting hairs. The defense attorney’s objective was clear: to prove the passivity of the seamen’s resistance. Their intent was not to challenge or to usurp anyone’s authority, but only to express their fear of working with explosives.

  Over the next few days, Coakley examined (and Veltmann cross-examined) a handful of the black seamen who had agreed to go back to work. In a major victory for Lieutenant Commander Coakley, the court ruled that the prosecution could use as evidence the statements that the men made under duress to Navy-appointed interrogators. Coakley’s tactic then was to furnish the witness with his signed statement, ostensibly to refresh his memory, and then to ask him leading questions based on it. Lieutenant Veltmann objected that the statements were inadmissible, arguing that the testimony should come from the witness and not from a piece of paper, but the court overruled.

  On September 21, Seaman First Class Edward Stubblefield, a black petty officer with the 8th Division, testified that Joe Small had spoken to the men on August 10. Coakley asked the seaman to tell the court what Small had said. Stubblefield seemed uncertain of himself and how to answer the question. He told the court that Small had said that “the boys was in enough trouble” and should “obey the shore patrol and the officers,” and that “if we stick together, they couldn’t do anyth
ing with us [because] we had the officers by the ass.”

  Coakley could see that Stubblefield was not going to say anything more.

  “What else, if anything, did he say at the time?” the lieutenant commander asked, noticeably frustrated with his witness.

  Stubblefield again seemed confused. “Well, at that time I—after he got through making the speech I didn’t hear them say anything else.”

  Coakley interrupted. “Now, just to refresh your recollection, I will call your attention to your signed statement,” he said, and showed the statement to Stubblefield.

  The seaman now realized what he had omitted. “Oh, yes,” he said. “If any guys back out, [they] would beat them up.”

  Over the next few days, Coakley summoned to the witness stand a number of junior-grade lieutenants who had been on hand between August 9 and August 11, and a host of seamen, most who were from the 8th Division, which had agreed to go back to work. The prosecution’s goal was to establish incontrovertible evidence for conspiracy by eliciting from them that a “no work” list had circulated around the barge; that some of them were threatened with physical violence if they did not sign the list; that a meeting in which the men were encouraged to stick together had taken place on the barge; and that the alleged rebellion had a ringleader in Joe Small.

  What might have been the most emotional part of the four days of testimony came when Lieutenant Commander Coakley called Joseph Gray to the stand. The events of August 11 had divided the Gray brothers. A member of the 4th Division, Joseph Gray, like his brother Charles, also a 4th Division seaman, had signed, a “don’t work” list aboard the barge. Sixty other men had signed the list, but after Admiral Wright’s speech, Joseph Gray lost his nerve. The image of being shot before a firing squad was too much for him. Unlike his brother Charles, Joseph did not remain with those who would not load, and pleaded guilty to disobedience in the summary court-martial. In doing so, he deserted his brother. Now he was a prosecution witness in a trial in which his brother was one of the defendants.